Wildcards - Down and Dirty Part 4

Brennan shook his head. "You couldn't even begin to guess. Look, you'd better disappear. I have to take care of things."

Jennifer looked at him silently. "I'll call you."

"Promise?" she asked.

Brennan nodded. She gave the Werewolves a final troubled glance, then faded through the wall again. Brennan had no intention of keeping the promise. None.

Not at all. But by the time he'd hoisted the first unconscious joker to his shoulders, his resolve was already fading.

V.

Fadeout, Siu Ma, and Deadhead were in conference when Brennan was admitted to the audience chamber. Deadhead was babbling lists of names, addresses, telephone numbers, bank accounts, and government connections. Everything that Covello had kept in the storehouse of his brain was Deadhead's. Everything the don had known....

A sudden insight struck Brennan. Only the dead, he thought, could know everything. They were finished and done with. Their lives were complete. Only the dead could know Jokertown, totally and completely, for they had no need of new knowledge. Like him, when he'd been in the mountains. His life had been peaceful, unchanging, and serene. And quite dead. Now he was living again. The sense of uncertainty and loss of control that had increasingly been plaguing him was the price he paid for living. It was a high price, but so far, he realized, he could afford it.

Fadeout and Siu Ma exchanged concerned glances when Brennan entered the chamber alone.

"What happened?" Fadeout asked.

"Ambush. That crazy Yeoman b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Killed Whiskers and the other Werewolves.

Pinned me to the wall by my d.a.m.n hand." Brennan held out his right hand. It was wrapped in a b.l.o.o.d.y rag torn from his s.h.i.+rt. It had hurt like h.e.l.l to drive the arrow through his palm. It'd been, Brennan reflected, penance of a sort for what he'd done since his arrival in the city.

"He let you live?" Siu Ma asked.

"He wanted me to deliver this. He said it was no good to him." He held up Kien's diary, which had been blanked when Jennifer had ghosted it from Kien's wall safe. He hated like h.e.l.l to give it back and let Kien know that he was safe from the secrets he'd written therein, but he had to give Kien something concrete to get him off Jennifer's back.

Fadeout took the diary from him and, mystified, riffled through its blank pages.

"Did ... did Yeoman do this?" Brennan shook his head. "He said it happened when Wraith stole it."

Fadeout smiled. "Well, that's great. That's really great." Even Siu Ma looked pleased.

"There was one more thing." Brennan forced himself to speak like a dispa.s.sionate messenger when he really wanted to brand the words on Fadeout's forehead so Kien would be sure to understand the iron behind them.

Fadeout and Siu Ma looked at him expectantly.

"He also had a message. He said to tell Kien-yeah, the name was Kien-that he knows where Kien lives, just as Kien knows where Wraith lives. He said to tell Kien that their feud goes beyond life and death, that it is one of honor and retribution, but that he will be satisfied with Kien's life if anything happens to Wraith. He says he has an arrow with Kien's name on it waiting... just waiting."

He'd delivered a similar promise a few months ago in behalf of another. But perhaps justifiably she had refused to accept his protection and chose instead to go away. Jennifer, though, had simply nodded when he'd told her his plan, had accepted it as if she truly, totally trusted him.

"I see." Fadeout and Siu Ma exchanged worried glances. "Well, yes, I'll pa.s.s that on." Fadeout nodded decisively. "I will indeed." He pulled worriedly at his lower lip.

Siu Ma stood up. "You have proven yourself worthy," she said. "I hope that your a.s.sociation with the Shadow Fists will be long and prosperous."

Brennan looked at her. He permitted himself to smile. "I'm sure it will," he said. "I'm sure it will."

All the King's Horses

by George R.R. Martin

I.

Tom found the latest issue of Aces in the outer office, while the loan officer kept him waiting.

The cover showed the Turtle flying over the Hudson against a spectacular autumn sunset. The first time he'd seen that photograph, in Life, Tom had been tempted to have it framed. But that had been a long time ago. Even the sh.e.l.l in the picture was gone now, jettisoned somewhere in s.p.a.ce by the aliens who'd captured him last spring.

Underneath, letters black against the scarlet-tinged clouds, the blurb asked, "The TurtleDead or Alive?"

"f.u.c.k," Tom said aloud, annoyed. The secretary gave him a disapproving look. He ignored her and thumbed through the magazine to find the story. How the h.e.l.l could they possibly say he was dead? So he got napalmed and crashed into the Hudson in full view of half the city, so what? He'd come back, hadn't he? He'd taken an old sh.e.l.l and crossed the river, flown over Jokertown near dawn the day after Wild Card Day, thousands of people must have seen him. What more did he have to do?

He found the article. The writer made a big deal of the fact that no one had seen the Turtle for months. Perhaps he died after all, the magazine suggested, and the dawn sighting was only some kind of ma.s.s hallucination. Wish fulfillment, one expert suggested. A weather balloon, said a second. Or maybe Venus.

"Venus!" Tom said with some indignation. The old sh.e.l.l he'd used that morning was a G.o.dd.a.m.n VW Beetle covered with armor plate. How the h.e.l.l could they say it was Venus? He flipped a page, and came face-to-face with a grainy photograph of a sh.e.l.l fragment pulled out of the river. The metal was bent outward, twisted by some awful explosion, its edges jagged and sharp. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put the Turtle together again, said the caption.

Tom hated it when they tried to be clever.

"Miss Trent will see you now," the secretary announced. Miss Trent did nothing to improve his disposition. She was a slender young woman in oversize horn-rimmed gla.s.ses, her short brown hair frosted with streaks of blond. Quite pretty, and at least ten years younger than Tom. "Mr. Tudbury," she said, from behind a spotless steel-and-chrome desk, when he entered. "The loan committee has gone over your application. You have an excellent credit record."

"Yeah," Tom said. He sat down, for a moment allowing himself to hope. "Does that mean I get the money?"

Miss Trent smiled sadly. "I'm afraid not."

Somehow he'd expected that. He tried to act as though it didn't matter; banks never lent you money if they thought you needed it. "What about my credit rating?" he asked.

"You have an excellent record of timely payment on your loans, and we did take that into account. But the committee felt your total indebtedness was already too high, given your present income. We couldn't justify extending you any further unsecured credit at this time. I'm sorry. Perhaps another lending inst.i.tution would feel differently."

"Another lending inst.i.tution," Tom said wearily. Fat chance. This bank was the fourth one he'd tried. They all said the same thing. "Yeah. Sure." He was on his way out when he saw the framed diploma on her wall and turned back. "Rutgers,"

he said to her. "I dropped out of Rutgers. I had better things to do than finish college. More important things."

She regarded him silently, a puzzled expression on her pretty young face. For a moment Tom wanted to go back, to sit down and tell her everything. She had an understanding face, at least for a banker.

"Never mind," he said.

It was a long walk back to his car.

It was just shy of midnight when Joey found him, leaning against a rusted rail and watching the moonlit waters of the Kill Van Kull. The park was across the street from his house, and from the projects where he'd grown up. Even as a kid, he'd found solace there, in the black oily waters, the lights of Staten Island across the way, the big tankers pa.s.sing in the night. Joey knew that; they'd been friends since grade school, different as night and day, but brothers in all but name.

Tom heard the footsteps behind him, glanced over his shoulder, saw it was only Joey, and turned back to the Kill. Joey came up and stood beside him, arms folded on the railing.

"You didn't get the loan," Joey said. "No," Tom said. "Same old story."

"f.u.c.k 'em."

"No," Tom said. "They're right. I owe too much."

"You okay, Tuds?" Joey asked. "How long you been out here?"

"A while," Tom said. "I had some thinking to do."

"I hate it when you think."

Tom smiled. "Yeah, I know." He turned away from the water. "I'm cas.h.i.+ng in my chips, Joey."

"What the f.u.c.k is that supposed to mean?"

Tom ignored the question. "I was getting nostalgic about that last sh.e.l.l. It had infrared, zoom lenses, four big monitors and twenty little ones, tape deck, graphic equalizer, fridge, everything on fingertip remote, computerized, state-of-theart, Four years I worked on that mother, weekends, nights, vacations, you name it. Every spare cent I had went into it. So what happens? I have the d.a.m.n thing in service for five months, and Tachyon's a.s.shole relatives just toss it into s.p.a.ce."

"Big f.u.c.king deal," Joey said. "You still got the old sh.e.l.ls out in the junkyard, use one of them."

Tom tried to be patient. "The sh.e.l.l the Takisians jettisoned was my fifth," he said. "After I lost it, I went back to number four. That was the one that got napalmed. You want to look at the pieces, go buy a copy of Aces-there's a swell picture in there. We cannibalized all the useful parts from two and three years ago. The only one that's still more-or-less intact is the first."

"So?" Joey said.

"So? It's got wires, Joey, not circuit boards, twenty-yearold wires. Obsolete cameras with limited tracking capabilities, blind spots, black-and-white sets, vacuum tubes, a f.u.c.king gas heater, the worst ventilation system you've ever seen."

"How I got it over to Jokertown back in September I still don't know, but I was in shock from the crash or I never could have tried such a f.u.c.king moronic thing. So many of the tubes burned out that I was flying half-blind before I got back."

"We can fix all that stuff."

"Forget it," Tom said with more vehemence than he knew was in him. "Those sh.e.l.ls of mine, they're like some kind of symbol for my whole f.u.c.king life. I'm standing here thinking about it, and it makes me sick. All the money I've put into them, all the hours, the work. If I'd put that kind of effort into my real life, I could be somebody. Look at me, Joey. I'm forty-three years old, I live alone, I own a house and an abandoned junkyard, both of them mortgaged up to the hilt. I work a forty-hour week selling VCRs and computers, and I've managed to buy a third of the business, only now the business isn't doing so great, ha ha, big joke on me. That woman in the bank today was ten years younger than me, and she probably makes three times my salary. Cute too, no wedding ring, the secretary said Miss Trent, maybe I would've liked to ask her out, but you know what? I looked into her eyes, and I could see her feeling sorry for me."

"Some dumb c.u.n.t looks down at you, that's no reason to get bent out of shape,"

Joey said.

"No," Tom said. "She's right. I'm better than I looked to her, but there's no way she could have known that. I've put the best part of myself into being the Turtle. The Astronomer and his goons almost killed me. f.u.c.k it, Joey, they dropped napalm on my sh.e.l.l, and one of them made me so sick I' blacked out. I could have died."

"You didn't."

"I was lucky," Tom said with fervor. "d.a.m.n lucky. I was strapped into that motherf.u.c.ker, every one of my instruments dead, with the whole f.u.c.king thing, all umpteen tons of it, headed straight for the bottom of the river. Even if I'd been conscious, which I wasn't, there would have been no way to get to the hatch and open it manually before I drowned. That's a.s.suming I could even find the hatch with all the f.u.c.king lights out and the sh.e.l.l filling up with water!"

"I thought you didn't remember this s.h.i.+t," Joey said.

"I don t," said Tom. He ma.s.saged his temples. "Not consciously. Sometimes I have these dreams ... f.u.c.k it, never mind about that, the point is, I was a dead man.

Only I got lucky, incredibly lucky, something blew the G.o.dd.a.m.ned sh.e.l.l apart, blew me right out without killing me, and I managed to make it to the surface.

Otherwise I'd be down in a steel tomb on the bottom of the Hudson, with eels slithering in and out of my eyes."

"So?" Joey said. "You're not, are you?"

"What about next time?" Tom demanded. " I been breaking my back trying to figure some way to finance a new sh.e.l.l. Sell my share of the business, I thought, or maybe sell the house and move into some apartment. And then I thought, well, great. I sell my f.u.c.king house, build a new sh.e.l.l, and then the G.o.dd.a.m.ned Takisians show up again, or it turns out the Astronomer had a brother and he's p.i.s.sed, or some other s.h.i.+t goes down, the details don't matter, but something happens, and I wind up dead. Or maybe I survive, only the new sh.e.l.l gets trashed just like the last two, and I'm right back where I started, except now I don't have a house either. What's the f.u.c.king point?"

Joey was looking into his eyes, Joey who had grown up with him, who knew Tom better than anybody. "Yeah, maybe," he said. "So why do I think there's something you're not saying?"

"I used to be a pretty smart kid," Tom insisted, turning away sharply, "but somehow I got pretty dumb as I grew up. This double life s.h.i.+t is a crock. One life is hard enough for most people to manage, what the h.e.l.l made me think I could juggle two?" He shook his head. "The h.e.l.l with it. It's over. I'm wising up, Joey. They think the Turtle is dead? Fine. Let him rest in peace."

"Your call, Tuds," Joey said. He put a rough hand on Toms shoulder. "It's a d.a.m.n shame, though. You're going to make my kid cry. The Turtle's his hero."

"Jetboy was my hero," Tom said. "He died too. That's part of growing up. Sooner or later, all your heroes die."

Concerto for Siren and Serotonin

by Roger Zelazny

I.

Sitting shade-clad in a booth at Vito's Italian, odd-hour and quiet, lowering a mound of linguini and the level in a straw-bound bottle-black hair stiff with spray or tonic---the place's only patron had drawn attention from the staff in the form of several wagers, in that this was his seventh entree, when a towering civilian with a hand like a club came in off the street and stood near, watching, also, through bloodshot eyes.

The man continued to stare at the diner, who finally swung his mirror lenses toward him.

"You the one I'm looking for?" the newcomer asked. "Maybe so," the diner replied, lowering his fork, "if it involves money and certain special skills."

The big man smiled. Then he raised his right hand and dropped it. It struck the edge of the table, removed the corner, shredded the tablecloth, and jerked it forward. The linguini spilled backward into the dark-haired man's lap. The man jerked away as this occurred and his gla.s.ses fell askew, revealing a pair of glittering, faceted eyes.

"p.r.i.c.k!" he announced, his hands shooting forward, paralleling the other's clublike appendage.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h!" the giant bellowed, jerking his hand away. "You f.u.c.kin' burned me!"

"f.u.c.kin' shocked,"' the other corrected. "Lucky I didn't fry you! What is this?

Why you taking my table apart?"

"You're hirin' f.u.c.kin' aces, ain't you? I wanted you to see my s.h.i.+t."

"I'm not hiring aces. I thought you were, the way you came on."